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to be blotted out. My wish grew so strong, my teeth bit so strongly on Aunt Phemie’s pillowcase, that my wish was granted.
    I am writing this to you, Ranald, quite calmly. That part of it is past. And the horrible night I had. It was really very horrible. There was a time when I thought I was going off my head for good. I think I must have gone off it for a bit because Aunt Phemie came in in her nightdress. I clung to her. But I was quite cunning. Isn’t it extraordinary how deep the cunning root goes in us? I know I had been calling out but when I got a hold on myself as well as on Aunt Phemie I said it was a nightmare. She accepted that. Though as I write this I am not now quite so sure. For she was—well, at first she was kind but firm. Then she was firm and tender. Then somehow she was tenderness itself and I entered in there. But that is too feminine altogether to mention to you. Yet I wish I could, too, because, Ranald—oh, I haven’t words for it. I entered a region. I was in that place where tenderness is. It is a country. Actually I was in Aunt Phemie’s bed, and you will think that she was petting me, and for a grown woman of twenty-five solid years to be made a mother’s darling again in that way is a bit too terrible if not positively indecent. I know, Ranald. Believe me, I am learning a lot—and particularly this: how awful a thing is man created in the image of the psychoanalyst. That’s not said lightly. I didn’t toy with Freud’s great tome on The Interpretation of Dreams for nothing. And I am not saying anything against that or any other work of the kind, for I know how instinctively we react, try to get our own back, against what we feel is a degradation of the spirit, a defilement of the springing source or fountain of life. You see, I cannot use even these words without now being aware of their sexual symbolism. And I don’t mind. I don’t really, Ranald. Not any more. For there is a region in which they matter no more than (or as much as, if you like) any other old myth or legend. It’s in that region I was with Aunt Phemie. I wandered there, and as she talked, telling me things out of her life, the tenderness was given form and shape as by a kind of irony which was beyond us but which we understood. I wish I could tell you how clear all this was, like an understanding of fate or destiny that was not hopeless though it was without hope—in the sense that we could never understand the meaning, the purpose, or the end. But it was there, as children are there, looked at by a woman’s eyes.
    But I mustn’t go on like this or you’ll be thinking I have gone potty again, finally neurotic. Yet, seeing I am on the topic, I would like to mention two thoughts I had (next day, probably, when I was thinking about this, in order to keep myself from thinking about the murder). The first was that it is a pity all the psychoanalysts are men, all the famous ones. There should have been at least one famous woman pioneer. The second thought was that there shouldn’t. Biologically speaking, woman is the creative partner. (“She bears the burden,” said Aunt Phemie.) It is not her particular business to analyse, to tear the strands and bits apart. Once she started that, the very unnaturalness (biologically, again) of her attitude would make her a perfect demon at it. You know how Julie went with drugs.
    My thought slipped there, Ranald. For I got very tired. I had a sudden awful longing to hand you the burden of myself. I am trying to be honest. I resent all this. I want the sun, the light, the light glistening on grass, on leaves; the wind that snares you with an eddy that you break out of with a laugh on your own dancing feet.
    My head drooped there. I squirmed a bit. For I know how the girls of our set—the quite serious ones, too, like Winifred—would feel uncomfortable before such appalling naïvety. They would see me throwing